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Finance director: I take blame for payment backlog

The Acting Director of Finance said Wednesday he takes the responsibility for problems that have left many businesses waiting for payments from the state.

Bill Newton also told legislators during budget hearings that there remained a backlog of 8,000 payments due to problems with the State of Alabama Accounting and Resource System (STAARS), which was upgraded in October for about 20 state agencies.

“I take 100 percent of the blame for this,” he said. “I should have asked questions I did not.”

The existing vendor won the contract to upgrade the system in a noncompetitive process.

Problems with the system left many companies awaiting payments, with one firm telling the Advertiser last month that they were waiting $1 million in payments at one point and another saying they had to take out a loan to pay bills while waiting payment. The problems also affected Open Alabama and the listing of government payments.

State officials said the issues were due to glitches and the difficulty in creating a new system. The problems got bad enough that in November the Comptroller sent a memo to agencies saying they could use state law to declare an emergency to improve payment processing. Newton said Wednesday the payments were “not cleared up completely just yet, but we’re close.”

Per questions from Sen. Clyde Chambliss, R-Prattville, Newton said the office was addressing 2,000 applications a day, and could finish processing the claims over four days.

He also insisted the problem stemmed from his not asking enough questions about the implementation of the system. Newton also said that with a 90-day window approaching, they may be looking at interest payments to vendors awaiting payment.

That raised some concerns from legislators.

“I look at 8,000 pending payments and having to pay late fees on that, I think that’s troubling, and it goes back to validating the competitive bid process,” said Sen. Bill Holtzclaw, R-Madison.